


your last love, everlasting (that was what you told me)

by Nevcolleil



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-12 23:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18456737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: [ An AU of the pilot. ]





	your last love, everlasting (that was what you told me)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress that's been progressing veeeerrry slowly... As in, this is the first fic I actually started writing for this fandom :p It feels sort of like passing around a page from my childhood diary to post any part of it now :p But a computer crash recently lost me some files, and this luckily was one that survived. I don't want to risk nearly losing it a second time, since - weird and old and maybe a little cheesy - I have an affection for it and how it could potentially end.
> 
> So, this is not the fic to read if you get frustrated by stories that aren't fully finished or will be in the very near future. If that isn't the case, maybe you'll enjoy this fic as is. If you know me and how I like these characters to end up, you can probably guess where it's going - and if you remember how the whole Nikki debacle ended up in canon (I began writing this before she was revealed to have been undercover) you can probably guess at why Jack does a particular thing he does in this story. (Or, rather, why Patty cornered him into doing a particular thing, not knowing about him and Mac and therefore not knowing the full consequences of what she's roped Jack into.) 
> 
> Let me know if you give it a shot, huh? :) I'm curious as to whether this even holds up well enough to continue.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day Mac had pulled Jack aside and asked if they could stop being so awkward and quiet around each other and just act like it had never happened had _killed_ him. But it had actually made things at work so much better. 
> 
> Mac should be doing at least that well outside of work also. 
> 
> If he’s just mourning some break-up he should be. Especially a pseudo-break-up that maybe sorta didn’t count, because there hadn’t been an official relationship to _break_ up...

‘ _This was all you...none of it me. You put your hands all over my body and told me... You told me you were ready-_ ’

It’s close, but Mac thinks he _just_ manages to seem casual about it as he stretches across the sink and hits ‘skip’. 

‘- _the big jump, I’d be your last love_ -’ becomes the peppy intro to a Chainsmokers song before the words can cut too deep, and if Mac leaves suds on his phone’s screen, well. That’s the least of his worries.

Bozer’s side-eying him from his own place at the kitchen counter, drying and putting away dishes while Mac washes (they take turns by the week.)

“Dude, seriously? _Still_?” Boze asks. “Mac, it’s been _nine_ months.”

And he doesn’t sound frustrated, is the thing. The _worst_ thing. Boze doesn’t sound impatient or incredulous... Just sad. Gentle. _Understanding_.

Which is _exactly_ what Mac has been trying to avoid. Because Bozer is exactly right. There shouldn’t be anything _to_ understand, not after nine months.

Mac got dumped. No, less than that - he got his hopes up about a handful of hook-ups and some sweet words. He got it into his head that there was a relationship for him to _get_ dumped out of, then he got a reality check.

Sucks.

Sometimes Mac can even make himself mean it when he thinks that _Jack_ sucks. For letting Mac get so carried away, even if there’s no way Jack could have known just how wrong Mac had gotten things in his own head. But Mac knows that Jack hadn’t meant to lead him on or to hurt him. He could have been clearer about his intentions, the first time he’d laid his hands on Mac and kissed him like-

Mac shakes his head and scrubs at the pot in his hands fiercely.

Jack could have been more careful with the way he pursued what, for him, had obviously been a fun experiment. An attempt to burn off some long-simmering tension before it flared any brighter? Or maybe just another bonding experience between two people who couldn’t _just_ be bonded by the number of times they’d nearly died together, not without becoming morbid or bitter.

Jack could have been less reckless. But that was just... Jack. And Mac forgave him for that months ago. He values their friendship too much to have done anything else. He wants Jack to stay in his life - _both_ his lives, personal and professional - and for things to still be good between them, even if they can never be the _kind_ of good Mac really wants things to be again.

So that should have been that. The day Mac had pulled Jack aside and asked if they could stop being so awkward and quiet around each other and just act like it had never happened had _killed_ him. But it had actually made things at work so much better. Almost like they had been before Mac had gotten a taste of what it turns out he’ll never truly have. 

Mac should be doing at least that well outside of work also. 

If he’s just mourning some break-up he should be. Especially a pseudo-break-up that maybe sorta didn’t count, because there hadn’t been an official relationship to _break_ up...

He shouldn’t be flinching at sad songs like he’s grieving the love of his life.

“I’m just sick of that song, alright?” - while lame - is Mac’s only defense.

“Uh-huh. You know what I’m sick of?” Bozer says so quickly, he had to have been anticipating Mac’s deflection. “Think tank _geniuses_ all acting like they’re so friggin’ _stupid_.”

 _Now_ Bozer sounds frustrated - angry, even. And now that he’s paying attention, Mac wonders if he ought to keep Boze away from their glassware until he calms down. Bozer’s drying the baking dish in his hands like it’s personally offended him and needs to be punished.

“Boze-”

“You think _Barbie_ would be pining like this over Jack if he ran off on her the way he ran off on you?” Bozer demands.

Well, there’s no use keeping up the pretense of being bored by Adele if Bozer won’t play along. “He didn’t ‘run off’ on me, Boze,” Mac says. “We talked about this. It wasn’t like that.”

It sometimes feels like that... Worse, maybe. As much as Mac can’t stand the thought of Jack leaving, or of leaving himself - of never seeing Jack in any capacity - seeing him every day the way that Mac had asked for, like they’d never been anything but partners and friends... Seeing Jack with Nikki, and seeing Jack so happy - so _uncharacteristically_ happy - _publically_ , with someone else...

Mac turns back to the sink as Bozer turns to put up the abused but intact baking dish, and he allows himself a moment to close his eyes and breathe. But then he pushes through it. 

“And I thought you liked Nikki.” 

As often as they’ve talked about this (and that’s been more often than Mac would like, even with all of his usually-successful efforts to avoid the topic and all of the time he’s away for work) Bozer’s never really addressed Nikki’s part in all this.

“First of all, you know what I mean," Bozer says. “And second of all: I did like her. When you liked her. When I didn’t know she was nosing in on your boy like- Like a homewrecker. Wrecking our home.”

That is-

That’s _entirely_ too close to how Mac feels, actually, and he swallows.

It’s also entirely unfair. Nikki hadn’t known that Mac and Jack were sleeping together at the same time that Jack first started seeking her out. That the “hang time” they’d had together at that time had more closely resembled the time spent together by a couple than that of a couple of buddies hanging out.

Before Jack had made his move, Mac had been sort of interested in Nikki himself. He’d invited her to the house several times, with and without a combination of Boze and Jack present simultaneously.

“She didn’t _wreck_ -”

“ _And_ ,” Bozer speaks over Mac loudly, interrupting Mac’s half-hearted denial. “That was before I realized what a good match you and Jack would make.”

A dinner plate slips out of Mac’s hands in the suds and clinks against a drinking glass, and Mac winces - but not just at the dishes.

Maybe Bozer is feeling a little impatient after all. There’s quite a bit he’s saying now that he hasn’t explicitly said to Mac before.

“Now she’s running around like little Missus-Jack-Dalton-in-the-making,” Bozer rants as he lays into a pie plate with as much fury as he’d unleashed on the baking dish - luckily missing whatever must cross Mac’s face at the visual _those_ words inspire. “And _he’s_ running around with her, while you’re here getting your sad sack on. And I swear... wasn’t neither of them as into each other when they used to hang out over here as they were _both_ into you.”

Bozer has _definitely_ never said that to him before.

Mac abandons the sink and the suds and faces his friend head-on. “Okay, and what’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Sure, Nikki had seemed into him back when Mac had shown a reciprocal interest. But she’d been just as into Jack, even before they must have actually started spending time alone together.

Hadn’t she? Mac can admit, after he and Jack began... whatever they’d had there for a while, he had stopped paying that much attention to Nikki, outside of as a co-worker and something of a friend.

But Jack- Mac knows for sure that Jack hadn’t acted any differently towards Mac around other people, including Bozer, after they’d started their ‘whatever’ than he ever had. Mac spent a truly pathetic amount of time after the ‘whatever’ ended reviewing every second of it in his head. (Honestly, he isn’t entirely done doing that - yes, even after nine months. He just does it less.) 

The observation that Jack had never acted as though the sex they’d had had changed anything was, in fact, one of the factors behind Mac’s decision to offer Jack a reset button on what had happened between them. Clearly, Mac had totally projected the significance _he’d_ placed on what they’d been doing, for just the few months before that, onto his perceptions of reality.

It had seemed clear to Mac, in any case.

Before Bozer can clarify why he’d say something to the contrary, however, Mac’s phone rings.

Mac’s not sure if he should feel cheated or relieved.

It’s not like whatever Bozer _thought_ he’d seen back when Jack was around more often would make any difference to anything, after all. Except maybe Mac’s ability to manage a potential reawakening of an old, unreasonable hope he’s fought hard to put to rest since Jack and Nikki became “official.”

Bozer’s already sighing when Mac’s phone is in his wet hands and Thornton’s name is on his screen.

“Let me guess. Your fellow stupid geniuses await,” Bozer says instead of answering Mac’s question.

“There’re these stats we’ve been waiting on from FICA for-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Despite his obvious exasperation, Bozer doesn’t make Mac stumble through one of his standard excuses. “Duty calls. _Again_. You know, _your_ think tank is the only think tank I’ve ever heard of that keeps its brainiacs on-call and _actually_ calls them. Like, a lot.”

He says it casually, playfully almost, but Mac’s heart just about jumps into his throat all the same.

Mac’s best friend has already called him out tonight on how much he _hasn’t_ gotten over Jack, whatever Mac would like to pretend. That’s one more truth than Mac would have preferred to be confronted about at the moment; he’d really rather not encounter another.

So it’s lucky that all Bozer does next is shake his head and give Mac an exaggerated look of disappointment.

“Though, if you all handle your work the way you handle your relationships, I can see why your boss has you all pulling extra hours,” Bozer deadpans.

The proper reaction to that is _definitely_ relief.

Not that Bozer needs to know that. Mac rolls his eyes.

“How many think tanks have you even heard of?” he asks, but he smiles when Bozer shoves him out of the way of the sink and graciously accepts the kitchen towel Bozer tosses more at his face than into his grasp.

“Just know that you owe me half a load of dishes next week, pal,” Bozer calls after Mac as Mac leaves the kitchen.

“Sure thing.”

“And hey...”

Something more serious, if no less affectionate, crosses his friend’s face when Mac looks back.

“You know I love you, right?” Bozer says. “I wouldn’t give you crap about this thing with Jack if I didn’t. When you hurt, I hurt, man. I just wish there was something I could say to fix it.”

‘You and me both, Boze,’ Mac thinks. The sentiment really does dull the ache Mac can’t help but still feel in his chest. If only a bit.

“I know, Boze. I love you, too. And I’m alright, alright?”

Mostly alright, anyways. But then, lies by omission are kind of Mac’s thing these days.

 

Mac would really be _more_ alright if the universe didn’t have a ‘stupid’ (to borrow Bozer’s apparent word of the day) way of picking at his emotional scabs.

Mac’s just pulling out of his driveway when he flicks on the radio, and what should happen to be playing at this exact moment?

‘ _We’ve gotta let go of all of our ghosts. We both know we ain’t kinds no more..._ ’

“Oh, for fuck’s-”

Mac’s first instinct is to slap the radio back off, but he stops himself. He’s cursing as he does - hands wrapped too-tight around the steering wheel, knuckles white - but he does it. 

Whether his was the average break-up, or less, (or more) it is high time that Mac do in private, where he can only drive himself - and maybe Bozer - crazy like this, what he forced himself to do at the DXS.

Cope.

Move on. Or, at least, convincingly appear to do so.

There’s a reason _this_ song, of all songs, gets to him so badly, after all. It’s not just that it’s such a pointed, sad break-up song. 

It’s that the last time Mac heard it... _before_... a break-up was the last thing it made him think about.

Jack sang it in the shower the morning after their last night together.

‘ _I was too strong, you were trembling... You couldn’t handle the hot heat rising..._ ’ Jack sang as he pressed tight up behind Mac, all corded muscles slick with soap and water the way they’d been slick with sweat as they’d pressed Mac down hours earlier. 

It hadn’t seemed odd - Jack singing a sad song so cheerfully as he nipped at Mac’s skin, chuckled when he bit too close to one of the more sensitive spots on Mac’s neck and Mac laughed out loud. Jack sings when he’s happy and when he’s drunk. It’s a thing he does - it never seems to matter to him what - and the song had been playing on the iPod Mac and Bozer once agreed to always have playing when one of them has company in the shower. 

That line, actually, had seemed especially appropriate in fact. Mac has seen Jack take aim before with broken fingers on both hands, and a near concussion, exhausted and in pain and nearly blinded by the Egyptian sun - and Jack _still_ shot steady that day. But every time he touched Mac once their bodies started moving together - _every_ time - Jack’s hands shook. They _trembled_. 

Mac still feels a stirring in his gut any time he thinks about it. He feels heat in his face. And he feels mortified because, then, he’d practically been _giddy_ thinking he could cause a reaction like that in the great Jack Dalton, ladies man and tough-guy Delta Force soldier. 

For all Mac knows, sex just makes Jack shaky. There wasn’t necessarily anything special about the sex Jack had with Mac. 

Couldn’t have been, actually. Because that same day, in the office, Thornton gave the whole team a pointed lecture about how relationships between agents aren’t prohibited at the DXS... but they are expected to be conducted with level-headedness and a respect for company protocols. And then she gave a playful little smirk at Jack... and then at Nikki. Who had rolled her eyes but smiled in Jack’s direction as soon as Thornton changed the subject back to the day’s mission.

And Jack- If Jack had been zoning out... or if he’d cracked a joke, maybe Mac would have remained in the dark a little longer. Long enough for the curls at the nape of his neck to fully dry, still damp from the shower he and Jack had just taken together back at his place. Long enough for the tune of that damned song to not still be stuck in Mac’s head.

But Mac had looked at Jack... and Jack had been staring straight at him. No joke in his eyes. Not even a smile on his face. Mac’s seen Jack’s deer-in-the-headlights, oh-shit-I-just-messed-up-didn’t-I face often enough to know it when he sees it.

‘ _...There’s only one way down..._ ’

The day had pretty much gone down-hill from there. Mac had avoided Jack as soon as their briefing let out, and Jack - tellingly - had let him.

Instead, Mac had sought out Nikki, to recon as subtly as he could. She’d been so excited about how “surprisingly well” things were going with Jack, she’d seemed only too happy to confide in Mac that she and Jack were quietly “seeing where things can go.” Had been for weeks.

Mac’s _whatever_ with Jack had been going on by then for over four months. Not because they’d been keeping it a secret (Mac had thought), but because they, too, had been quietly figuring things out. Only they must have been a lot quieter than even Mac had realized, because Thornton hadn’t called Jack and _Mac_ out in front of the rest of their team members.

‘... _Send my love to your new lover, treat her better..._ ,’ Adele croons just before Mac gives in and turns the radio off, driving the rest of the way to work in silence, but he can’t block the memory of the lyrics from his mind for long.

“It’s been over now for longer than it _wasn’t_ ,” Mac scolds himself out loud before he gets out of his car. 

If only he could make the memory of those lyrics a mantra. (‘ _I’m giving you up, I’ve forgiven it all..._ ’) Maybe then he could _actually_ be set free.

 

“I should have known,” Mac can only mutter when the vault’s alarms start blaring.

Maybe it’s superstitious - paranoid - but after Cairo, Mac’s pretty sure both he and Jack have become a lot more sensitive to potential bad omens.

And that _fucking_ song has never meant good things for Mac.

“ _Known? Known_ what?” Jack’s voice comes to him over the comms, tinny and suddenly tense.

“ _Mac, get out of there now_!” Nikki adds, much more frantically - which, seeing as she has access to the security cameras in this villa, is yet another bad sign.

“Mac! Mac, you alright?” Jack asks when the ensuing fight between Mac and several guards falls silent.

Mac lets the sounds of his rapid breathing as he escapes out a window speak for themselves.

But of course - _of course_ \- Fate has more to say on the subject. 

Mac makes it to the boat where Jack is waiting to speed them, and the biological agent he’s just liberated, to safety. Together they make it through a high-speed boat chase with a fuel leak, a shoot-out in which they’re out-gunned (and running out of ammo), an explosion, and a blind swim in the general direction of Nikki and their get-away van.

Just your typical ‘Mac and Jack’ S.O.P.

Except _that song_ had been playing just before Mac received this mission. So of course there’s nothing typical about it.

They get back to the van only to find it taken by bad guys with guns, one pointed at Mac’s heart, one held under Nikki’s chin, and one the mirror image to Jack’s own, which had risen faster than it had taken Mac to realize what is happening.

“The cannister, please,” Bad Buy #1 (Mac assumes he’s in charge, at least of this small bunch) requests politely in a rough British voice.

And Mac will feel awful later - _is_ awful - because Nikki is his friend. They’ve worked together now for two years, and her life has value to him outside of her relation to Jack’s happiness.

But the first thing that runs through Mac’s mind as he stares down that gun is that Jack could be about to watch someone he loves die because of Mac. Because Mac can’t hand this cannister over.

“Let her go,” he demands in his strongest voice.

He’s sure the breathlessness behind his bravado doesn’t help sell a stoic facade.

“That’s not how these exchanges work, Mr. Macgyver,” #1 says. “You hand over the cannister... and I will let your friend live.”

“Don’t do it, Mac,” Jack is quick to say, which should surprise exactly _no one_ who knows how loyal Jack is to his country.

But then he says something that _does_ surprise Mac. “And don’t you hurt him,” he almost growls. 

‘Don’t you hurt _him_ ’ instead of ‘her’. Mac spares a glance in Jack’s direction and sees that Jack’s gaze is fixed on a three-point track - continually swerving from the masked man in his sights, past Nikki - and then stuttering to and from Mac.

There’s no time for Mac to interpret any of all that.

“Give it to me and maybe nobody gets hurt,” #1 presses. 

“Maybe I drop this right now, and we all die,” Mac tries to bluff.

It was never going to work. Mac sees that in the glint of the big guy’s teeth as he grins in the moonlight illuminating this fiasco.

“Oh, you won’t kill them,” he says with relish. “But I will if you don’t give me that cannister. I won’t ask you again.”

And then he does something that stops the blood to Mac’s heart.

His eyes flit to the right for just a second - just that little bit then back. And it’s barely perceptible in the dim light... but Mac sees him nod, just slightly, at the man holding his gun on Jack. In response, from what Mac can see in the near-dark, the masked man subtly shifts on his feet.

Kill ‘them’, #1 had said. Mac can’t hand over this cannister. But _them_... Jack.

“Oh, I can’t stand it.”

Suddenly, the world tilts on its axis.

That was Nikki’s voice, and now Nikki steps away from her captor... Or is that what he is? 

“Nik-” Mac starts to say, to step forward, before he registers the blankness on her face. No fear. No flight. 

Not that Nikki seems to need to take flight - #1 is still smirking. Smirking even more now, maybe, and he doesn’t so much as flinch as Nikki easily removes herself from his grasp.

It all happens in a split second, and in that second Mac is rendered completely, dumbly vulnerable by shock.

The arm holding the cannister lowers and his grip loosens, just enough that when _another_ masked man darts out from the darkness behind him, Mac doesn’t realize the cannister’s being taken from him until it has been.

“ _No_!” Jack screams - a loud, booming sound.

Except. The boom doesn’t come from Jack. And it’s accompanied by a sharp, stinging pain in Mac’s chest that jerks him backward like the impact of a truck.

Bad guy #1‘s gun arm is still raised, and even though Mac can’t seem to tilt his head down far enough to see the gun wound that must be bleeding through his shirt now, he knows that he’s been shot.

He also knows that the sensation of falling that overcomes him isn’t vertigo from the trauma - the world is tilting for real, not just in his perceptions. The jerk that had knocked him back has apparently knocked him to the edge of the bridge on which the DXS van is parked - Mac feels the low railing of the old bridge against the back of his thighs as he falls backwards over it.

“Mac! No, God-”

But Mac doesn’t know what Jack has to say to God.

The earth rushes up and away from him, then there’s only cold, and wet, and that sting becoming everything until there’s absolutely nothing else. 

 

Mac remembers the day his ‘whatever’ with Jack began.

Duh, right? These days, it takes a conscious effort on Mac’s part not to remember every second of that day. Vividly.

Right now, though, Mac can’t remember why he’d ever felt the need to put in that effort. It’s the best memory he’s made recently. Other than every other memory he and Jack made together before it all fell apart.

It was after the job after the job after Cairo. All of the formal inquisitions, the many debriefings and internal reviews, were finally over, and they’d been back at work for awhile. Long enough that they could say 'we don’t talk about Cairo’ instead of just actually never talking about Cairo, even when asked.

And maybe it was because Jack was just still feeling raw from all of the times that they’d nearly died on that mission, either separately or together. Maybe it was because Mac couldn’t close his eyes without picturing Jack raising his weapon with his mangled hands - not towards the enemies converging on his position, but on the one advancing on Mac. Or maybe they’d just always been building up to this, but whatever the reason...

When Mac and Jack returned from Tangier, there was something different in the energy that always flowed between them, sharp as the charge on an electric fence - ready to spark at the slightest touch. It was harder for Mac to ignore Jack’s proximity whenever they stood near one another - to ignore the scent of his aftershave and his skin. Even the cargo hold they hitched a ride home in felt warmer than it should when they slumped against the same bulkhead, bodies aligned shoulder to thigh.

Jack’s usual jokes and idle chatter, the easy banter between them, suddenly felt like a script. Hastily penned just to paste over the subtext threatening to tear right through the itinerary of their normal lives.

“Aw, fuck this,” Jack fell quiet and then loudly proclaimed, just as Mac turned into Jack’s drive, having promised Thornton to take him home if she agreed to release Jack without getting him deemed concussion-free by the docs (again).

Mac practically jumped in his seat.

“What-”

“This sussing things out is for the birds, man,” Jack said. “I’m never _not_ going to be too nervous about this to get a good read on where we stand. Not if I don’t just come right out and ask you.”

“What are you talking about, Jack?” Mac carefully parked and then turned to ask.

But of course he knew what. Mac’s heart was in his throat with knowing, his pulse shaking his whole body with its force. 

Jack looked him straight in the eyes. He was sprawled in his seat, the way he sprawls anywhere he feels safe enough to do so. Limbs loose, and yet he never looks less predatory to Mac, having seen how quickly Jack can move from looking supine and sleepy to poised to strike and deadly.

Deadly in the best possible way, if that makes sense to anyone not in their line of work. Mac felt drunk in that moment just on the way Jack was looking at him. On how easily Jack let himself relax every guard in Mac’s presence, and still made Mac feel like the one vulnerable.

“What I’m talking about, Mac, is how bad I want to kiss all the sense out of that big, beautiful brain of yours,” Jack forged ahead and said. “Which, I’m thinking, could be quite the task. A brain like yours? We’re talkin’ a lot of kissing to make that happen. And I want it.”

Mac didn’t think twice about it.

He maybe didn’t think _once_.

“You... shouldn’t have to try that hard to kiss me senseless, actually,” came out of his mouth, and whatever was on his face had to have been a pretty clear indication of ‘yes, please.’ 

Jack’s face lit up like Christmas, and that was all Mac could care about in the moment.

“Oh, yeah? And why’s that?” Jack pressed, instead of just getting to the kissing already. 

He was provoking Mac. Just as he’s always done. Feeding Mac a bravado, through just the presence of his own brashness, that has served time and time again as the fuel for some of Mac’s most risky improvisations. 

“Because all I’ve been able to think about since Morrocco," Mac said, “is how I wish I could get my mouth on you for real.”

He’d had to give Jack mouth-to-mouth in Tangier - and obviously, at that time, making out was the last thing on Mac’s mind. But hours later he found himself worrying at his bottom lip, wondering about the taste that lingered there... And when he realized that he’d only had one thing touch his mouth in the last twelve hours - that the flavor could only possibly belong to _Jack_ -

Jack groaned and rasped, “Amen to _that_ , brother,” in a voice straight out of Mac’s fantasies. Contrary to his ironic choice in appellation, he all but lunged at Mac as Mac also stretched towards him.

And Jack kissed exactly how Mac had imagined he would, when he’d let himself imagine it - even convinced as he’d been, before Cairo, that Jack couldn’t possibly mean the flirting and the heated looks they’d been exchanging since... forever... the same way Mac would _like_ for him to mean them.

Namely, Jack kissed like he fights. All-in, full-throttle, with a touch like a battlecry - calloused hands sure and so strong on either side of Mac’s face, holding him in the kiss with a desperation that made Mac moan.

“Oh, yeah,” Jack pulled back to pant. “Do that. You keep doing that, Mac. Holy shit...” Mac had never heard that particular register in Jack’s voice - a sound like hunger, and he laughed out loud, only to moan again when Jack took advantage, swooping back onto Mac’s mouth, this time with an eager tongue.

Mac can’t precisely remember how long they sat outside in his car, making out like teenagers with the headlights on and the engine running. There was more laughing - and some cursing, as one or the other of them got carried away in the confines of the car’s tiny cab.

Eventually Jack moaned the words into Mac’s mouth: “Mac... Mac, we gotta take this inside. We-”

Then, like a bulb flickering back to life, the thought seemed to stutter to life in him: “Should- _Should_ we take it inside? I’m not tryin’ to push this too far too fast, man, but-”

“Fast?” Mac could only say, chasing another groan up out of Jack’s throat with sharp biting kisses up the length of Jack’s arched neck, followed by soft brushes of his lips against the stubble there. “We should have been doing this _years_ ago. What do you mean, fast?”

That seemed to be all Jack needed to hear - or maybe, like Mac, he’d just already reached that point where it seemed impossible to listen to anything but the staccato inside, the crash of blood and endorphines in waves that whispered ‘more’ and ‘now’ and ‘why not?’.”

“Well, hell,” Jack said, with a final smack to Mac’s lips. “Get that pretty little ass inside then, amigo, and I’ll _show_ you fast.”

Then he blinked and paused for a moment. “Wait. That’s not what I-”

And Mac’s pretty sure Jack took his continued laughter as a sort of disparagement, in those early days. Mac’s certainly never laughed as much - period, much less during sex - with anyone else he’s ever slept with.

But when he remembers that moment, Mac remembers fondly the heat of Jack’s lips against his adam’s apple as Mac’s head tipped back with his laughter. 

“Yeah, yeah. Have some mercy, would you?” Jack spoke against Mac’s skin. “You got me so turned on, boy... it’s a miracle I’m speaking English.”

It’s a really sweet memory to follow Mac into his dying dreams.

Except Mac doesn’t die. He knows he hasn’t the second time the dream memory plays all the way out and then resets, becoming a nightmare the third time through - him lying on a deserted bridge in the dark, Jack straddling his waist wearing the dark gear he’d worn in Cairo. 

“I sure am sorry it had to go this way, babe,” Jack says as he digs two gloved fingers into the bleeding wound in Mac’s shoulder and Mac throws back his head and screams.  
“If you don’t kill him, I will,” the man who shot Mac says, stepping out of the shadows, and he presses the barrel of his gun to the underside of Jack’s chin. Jack smirks at Mac over the ready weapon and winks.

Mac’s coma lasts for more than a month.

 

Jack’s isn’t the first face Mac sees when he finally wakes up.

It’s the second.

The first is his doctor’s - Mac opens his eyes to a blinding penlight and closes them again on instinct.

“What-” Mac starts then stops, the particular rasp of his voice his first sign that - wherever he is - he has to have been there for a while now. And not voluntarily.

“Welcome back to the world, Mr. Macgyver. Happy to have you with us this morning.”

His second sign comes in the form of the sound of Jack’s loud snoring, suddenly catching his attention in the background of the doctor’s calm words.

Jack is a trained operative, who slept on his feet between paper-thin walls once, and was never detected by the men he was surveilling in that position. Mac can guess what kind of sleep might possibly turn his partner into a white noise machine.

And sure enough, when the doctor takes one step to the side, Mac can see the chair that’s been pulled up within reaching distance of his hospital bed - he can also see its inhabitant.

If Jack wasn’t sleeping _at this second_ , and doing it loudly, Mac wouldn’t have believed that he’s slept at all. Not in the last seventy-two hours. He looks haggard. There’s really no other word for it. His stubble must have stubble. There are dark circles under his eyes.

Mac answers the doctor’s questions and submits to his tests. (“Just a few,” the doctor promised. “We don’t want to exhaust you, but we don’t want to lose you again, either.” Mac refrained from asking how they’d “lost” him before.)

And at some point, the snoring stops. Mac only realizes that it’s missing when he turns his head while the doctor uses on auriscope on his opposite ear. His eyes flutter open, and suddenly he’s looking straight at Jack while Jack looks straight back at him.

Mac can’t remember yet exactly why he’s lying in this bed, but it’s no mystery that the reason must be bad. There are tears in Jack’s eyes.

_There are tears in Jack’s eyes._

“We’ll let you rest a bit and come back later,” Mac barely hears the doctor say, although he catches the sharp look Jack gives the man - which is pretty damned sharp, teary-eyed or not. Mac has a feeling no one is going to ask Jack to leave Mac’s room while he rests.

And no one does. 

Jack is eerily quiet for the duration, but as soon as the door closes and he and Mac are alone, he drags the chair as close to the bed as he can get it, and he just.

He collapses. Mac doesn’t know what else to call it. And not even into the chair.Jack seems to think about it before folding forward into a careful, hug-like, quasi-embrace - wrapping one arm tentatively around Mac’s shoulders and burying his face in Mac’s hair. 

“Oh my god... Oh my god, Mac,” Jack breathes.

“Jack, I’m alright.”

It can’t be a pleasant embrace for Jack... hunching over like this after sleeping in a stiff chair. Mac’s certain he doesn’t _smell_ pleasant. His hair feels greasy and limp to him, so it must feel pretty rank to Jack. But Jack acts like he never wants to move anywhere else.

In the meantime, a few things start to make sense to Mac. 

He’s been shot - that’s the first thing that comes back to him, if you can call figuring out why his left arm and his torso have been bandaged in exactly the way that they have “coming back”. Mac still doesn’t remember actually getting shot, who shot him, or why.

It’s been too long since Mac’s face and Jack’s face have been this close to one another.

That may seem like an absolutely ridiculous thing for Mac to think about in lieu of the whole _having been shot_ and in a coma thing, and it probably is. But something about the heat of Jack’s body, just where it’s so near to his own - and the scent of Jack’s skin (yes, even after his having slept in a chair for probably more than a day)... Mac brings his right arm up as quickly as he’s able without intensifying the pain in his chest as he moves, and he balls his fist in the side of Jack’s coat.

“I thought that was it, man,” Jack says into Mac’s hair. “I thought you were gone. And we got a deal, don’t we? I go before you go.”

Mac remembers the first time Jack asked him to make that bargain, after a near miss in Quebec, of all places. And luckily Mac’s heart monitor doesn’t register what he _feels_ like a pretty steep spike of his pulse at the memory.

Jack had been under a sheet at the time. Giving his lips a very thorough tour of Mac’s anatomy. 

“I never agreed to that,” Mac says now. He wouldn’t have, even if he hadn’t been too distracted at the time to speak sensible words.

“Yeah, well, I’m holding you to it regardless. I can’t lose you, Mac. I just can’t.”

It’s not- It’s not _fair_ for Jack to say stuff like this. After everything.

As more of Mac’s memory returns, the more he knows it, but the words warm him all the same. This _is_ what he wanted, after all. To keep this closeness between him and Jack, this affection and concern, even if the romantic and sexual development of that closeness ended up being a false-start. He’s lucky their little mistake (as much as it hurts Mac to think of it as that) didn’t ruin everything.

Mac’s just. What he _knows_ and what he _feels_ don’t aways line up...

And he can’t imagine that Jack hasn’t picked up on that.

Just this morning, Jack had-

This morning. No, _that_ morning. Mac has no idea how long ago. The morning he and Jack and Nikki-

Mac licks numb lips and hopes he’s gotten it wrong - that he’s dreamt up what he thinks he remembers... “Jack,” he says, “Nikki...” 

Jack stiffens, and Mac know he’s gotten it - _somehow_ \- right.

“Oh, don’t you worry about her,” Jack says, pulling back - but only so far that he can look Mac in the face. “We’ll find her. You and me. Soon as you’re good to go here, we’ll sort it all out. _All_ of it, Mac. I promise.”

Mac can’t quite follow what Jack is saying - or why he looks so intense saying it, eyes locked on Mac’s, big hands framing Mac’s face.

Waking up from a coma will do that to you, Mac supposes.

When he says, “I’ve missed you, Jack,” Mac is only half aware that he says it out loud. His eyelids are already drooping.

And the words don’t make sense. Like Mac told Bozer - Jack didn’t go anywhere. He stayed right here. He’s been here for Mac, in every way but that one - the one way Mac has no right to ask Jack for if it’s not what Jack wants. 

Nikki... doing whatever she’s done... hasn’t changed anything. Certainly not this fast. Mac hasn’t been in a coma for that long. Right?

Maybe not. Still, before he’s completely out, Mac swears he hears Jack say, “I’ve missed you too, babe. God, Mac... You don’t even know.”


End file.
